I'm still skeptical that he'll fire or try to fire Mueller. Trump is a bully in the classic sense that he doesn't pick fights he can't win. He only goes after clearly weaker people or phony fights with no real risk. If/when the investigation and indictments start to threaten him or his dumb-ass kids, I think he's inclined to cut a deal to get past it all—resign in exchange for escaping charges for him and his kids. There's no evidence that he likes his job and would rather just be a celebrity, so is this job worth fighting for? There's no principled fight in the asshole, just self-interest, and if quitting keeps him and his safe, that's his instinctual play. A public fight that he can't win just seems contrary to his ego.

I'm still skeptical that he'll fire or try to fire Mueller. Trump is a bully in the classic sense that he doesn't pick fights he can't win. He only goes after clearly weaker people or phony fights with no real risk. If/when the investigation and indictments start to threaten him or his dumb-ass kids, I think he's inclined to cut a deal to get past it all—resign in exchange for escaping charges for him and his kids. There's no evidence that he likes his job and would rather just be a celebrity, so is this job worth fighting for? There's no principled fight in the asshole, just self-interest, and if quitting keeps him and his safe, that's his instinctual play. A public fight that he can't win just seems contrary to his ego.

Yeah, but he's also incredibly stupendously dumb and inclined to fire house plants. NOTHING is out-of-bounds with his impulses. When it's the shit-your-pants level panic of the investigation starting to pick off family members, he's already shown he's not above self-immolating for momentary gratification that doesn't actually solve any problem of his.

I'm still skeptical that he'll fire or try to fire Mueller. Trump is a bully in the classic sense that he doesn't pick fights he can't win. He only goes after clearly weaker people or phony fights with no real risk. If/when the investigation and indictments start to threaten him or his dumb-ass kids, I think he's inclined to cut a deal to get past it all—resign in exchange for escaping charges for him and his kids. There's no evidence that he likes his job and would rather just be a celebrity, so is this job worth fighting for? There's no principled fight in the asshole, just self-interest, and if quitting keeps him and his safe, that's his instinctual play. A public fight that he can't win just seems contrary to his ego.

Yeah, but he's also incredibly stupendously dumb and inclined to fire house plants. NOTHING is out-of-bounds with his impulses. When it's the shit-your-pants level panic of the investigation starting to pick off family members, he's already shown he's not above self-immolating for momentary gratification that doesn't actually solve any problem of his.

Certainly possible, especially if he's suffering from some kind of dementia. But I wonder if there is, in fact, some unconscious control to that impulsiveness, where he doesn't actually pick fights with people who could seriously hurt him. I don't know enough of his biography whether that's true, but what I have seen and read suggests chickenshit bully.

It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More. The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude. He watches a lot of cable news, but he struggles to follow even stories that have been custom built for people like him—old, uninformed, amorphously if deeply aggrieved.

There’s a reason for this. Trump doesn’t know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself, because he has no interest in any topic beyond himself; his evident cognitive decline and hyperactive laziness and towering monomania ensure that he will never again learn a new thing in his life. He has no friends and no real allies; his inner circle is divided between ostensibly scandalized cynics and theatrically shameless ones, all of whom hold him in low regard and see him as a potential means to their individuated ends. There is no help on the way; his outer orbit is a rotation of replacement-level rage-grandpas and defective, perpetually clammy operators.

The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude. … his evident cognitive decline and hyperactive laziness and towering monomania ensure that he will never again learn a new thing in his life.

I've read similar assessments about Reagan in the White House. Part of his problem, these views argue, is that Reagan's political views stopped growing in the 60s. So he campaigned throughout the 70s and 80s on this increasingly outdated worldview, and it left him handicapped as president. The key difference, I guess, is that by all accounts Reagan was a personally decent man—albeit very compartmentalized so that his public policies never contradicted his private acts—whereas Trump is worse in private than public.